We’ve worked with numerous businesses throughout the years who lost everything due to bad backups or lack of a disaster recovery plan. It’s not unusual, but the results can be devastating.
In fact, about 75% of small businesses have no disaster recovery plan objective in place, which is why so many fail after a disaster. Knowing the basics for backups and recovery are crucial to bouncing back after the worst happens.
Create A Detailed Disaster Recovery Plan
Disaster Recovery Plan Template The next step is to create a detailed disaster recovery plan to distribute so everyone knows what to do when a particular disaster occurs. Everything from which systems are critical to how employees interact on social media should be covered. lists various templates to help create a more detailed plan.
Backup Regularly
It should go without saying that backups are the most important part of a disaster recovery plan. After all, without backups, there’s no way to restore a business without starting from scratch.
Sadly, many businesses don’t think it’ll happen to them. However, 40% of businesses say they’ve experienced over eight hours of downtime following a breach in a single year. Whether it’s a breach, natural disaster or hardware failure, anything can happen and leave a business down. Backups allow a business to get back online faster, no matter what the issue may be.
Test Backups
Having backups isn’t enough. Even if a business backs up data daily, those backups mean nothing if they don’t work. It’s an issue we’ve seen all too often. When the worst happens, a business tries to recover with a backup only to find the data is corrupted or the backup media is damaged.
Testing the integrity of backups is vital to ensuring a fast recovery. Even if a business uses cloud backups, they should test to know how long it’ll take to restore backups from their service provider.
Know Potential Disasters
The word “disaster” makes many businesses think only about natural disasters, but it also refers to cybersecurity, human error, hardware failure and software errors. Every business, no matter how small or large, needs a disaster recovery plan. The first step is understanding all potential disasters, the probability of those happening and what it would take to recover. For instance, a breach wouldn’t use the same steps as a fire.
Our final piece of advice is to test and revise the recovery plan at least yearly. We’ve seen businesses be prepared, only to have their plans be too outdated to work.
Need help with backup and disaster recovery? See how our disaster recovery planning and testing services can help.